Can you believe The Nation actually makes you pay for this stuff? Alexander Cockburn on why Darfur is a fashionable media crisis, whereas Israeli depredations in Gaza would cause yawns if anyone in the US were aware of such depredations in the first place:
Darfur is primarily a "feel good" subject for people here who want to agonize publicly about injustices in the world but who don't really want to do anything about them. After all, it's Arabs who are the perpetrators and there is ultimately little that people in this country can do to effect real change in the policy of the government in Khartoum.
Now, Gaza is an entirely different story. The American public as well as the US government have a great deal of control over what is happening there. It is Israel, America's prime ally in the Middle East, that is on a day-to-day basis, with America's full support, inflicting appalling brutalities on a civilian population. To report in any detail on what's going on in Gaza means accusing the United States of active complicity in terrible crimes wrought by Israel, as it methodically lays waste a society of 1.4 million Palestinians.
It's true. I feel great about wanting to end the genocide of 200,000 black Africans and the displacement of 2.5 million more. According to the outgoing U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, Darfur's "free fall" now threatens to spill into Chad and Central African Republic and possibly lead to the starvation of the always-copasetic number of 6 million indigent refugees in total.
Cockburn's bait-and-switch essay about a bait-and-switch media culture is made even more pathetic by the fact that he then cites Ha'aretz for its "searing reports" about how cruel and inhumane Israel has been to the residents of Gaza. (He also argues that much of this information is inaccessible to American audiences, kept, as it is, in a strict state of purdah by Israel — though apparently not so strict that his brother Patrick couldn't address the issue in the British newspaper The Independent, which is also quoted from in this piece.)
I don't know why the left makes such a virtue of its short attention span for global horror and misery. The rather facile answer Cockburn comes up with is that its comforting when the perps aren't U.S. or U.S.-backed forces but those shady A-rabs. Let's concede that a small (or not so small) segment of the American Jewish community, which has been screaming for intervention to stop the Darfur genocide for quite a while now, is acting out of bad faith, or at least mitigated good faith, because Khartoum is ruled by people closer in skin tone to Palestinians than, say, were Bosniacs when that same community demanded an end to their genocide on European soil. Does this mean that the behavior of the janjaweed is any more acceptable, or that Darfur any more ignorable a disaster? Why can't Cockburn entertain his suspicions without resorting to the sub-cretinous mode of "Sorry, nothing to be done in Africa. Now, directing your attention to the region where AIPAC takes an energetic interest…"
I think I prefer the feel-good activists of the New York Times to the feel-nothing shits of CounterPunch.
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